Digital ethics framework recommendations for social media archiving applications

Abstract

Citizen journalism performed through social media platforms is increasingly becoming a default means of communication networking and information consumption for local and global audiences. This increase in social media information networking has garnered interest within the domain of communication and media studies as recent domestic and international social movements have been studied in relation to their social media network basis. Consequently, the academic community is now considering social media archiving of Tweets related to significant historical events as an emerging academic field of inquiry. Despite the social and historical import of digital ethics in social media archiving and the emerging development of social media archiving as a field of investigation, there is a need for scholarly work that aims to systematically develop a social media archiving digital ethics framework informed by a multi-disciplinary ethics analytical structure for current and emerging digital social media archiving tools and applications. The work presented in this thesis is focused on developing social media archiving digital ethics framework recommendations for the social media archiving tool DocNow as well as other similar potential future social media archiving tools. In order to develop well-informed digital ethics framework recommendations, this study draws from Information and Communication Technology, new media, citizen journalism, and social media ethics framework.